[RTTY] Key clicks seemed less severe last weekend

[David G3YYD]

Tim

I agree here on the western side of Europe there were fewer wideband signals
compared to previous years. The worst I heard was a Ukraine call who was
very wide. People are moving to AFSK/replacing their old rigs (especially
the older Icom rigs) with newer radios with improved performance.

Now if only the rig reviewers would include FSK testing in their reviews...

73 David G3YYD

-----Original Message-----
From: RTTY [mailto:rtty-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Tim Shoppa
Sent: 28 September 2017 14:12
To: rtty at contesting.com
Subject: [RTTY] Key clicks seemed less severe last weekend

While my ears are still ringing:

In CQ WW RTTY 2017, there seemed to be a general improvement in signal
quality, especially with regards to a reduction in stations showing severe
key clicks.

I don't track the waveshaping improvements ( see K0SM's article
http://www.frontiernet.net/~aflowers/k3rtty/k3rtty.html ) through every
possible contesting rig hardware/firmware update, but I suspect that K0SM's
lessons have been taken up by several manufacturers in the past 5 years.

Huge amount of credit goes towards K0SM's for his exceptionally clear
writeup and all the manufacturers who followed through on cleaning up their
rigs.

It is also possible that contesters have been been moving towards AFSK,
which is another K0SM recommendation for clean RTTY signals.

Also, GRITTY has always been exceptional at being able to decode through
QRMing stations a kHz or two away with bad keyclicks. It seems to do best in
this regard when run at very wide receiver bandwidth. I don't know if this
keyclick rejection is an intentional design goal of GRITTY or just a natural
result of its technologies. I only had to lean on this ability a handful of
times this past weekend, less often than in previous years.

Also, I noticed fewer off-frequency callers than in past years. And I
noticed a very definite increase in callers who seemed completely unaware of
the difference in search vs running macros  - aka "upside down exchanges" as
I've complained about in past years. Not only can these newbies not figure
out that they send their call (and not their exchange) in response to my CQ,
they also continually QRM'ed me when I was S&P by trying to work me as if I
was the CQ'ing station

Tim N3QE
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